Have you ever wanted to take a year off from your life? A meandering, serendipitous journey around the world with your family? It sounds impossible. But one day, David Elliot Cohen, co-creator of the bestselling Day in the Life and America 24/7 book series, decided to make this dream a reality. Over the course of six months, he and his wife sold their house, cars, and most of their possessions. He closed his business and pulled their three young children out of school. With only a suitcase, a backpack, and a passport per person, the Cohen family set off on a rollicking round-the-world journey filled with laugh-out-loud mishaps, heart-pounding adventures, and unforeseen epiphanies. In Botswana, the Cohens’s tiny motorboat is charged by a hippo. In Zimbabwe, lions ambush a buffalo outside the family’s tent. In Australia, their young daughter is caught in a riptide and nearly pulled out to sea. In One Year Off, you can join the family on a trek up a Costa Rican volcano, cruise the canals of Burgundy by houseboat, and ride ferries through the Greek Islands. Later, as the Cohens wander further off the tourist trail, you can drive through the villages of Rajasthan, traverse the vast Australian Nullarbor, and discover the charms of Cambodia’s Angkor Wat and the hidden shangri-las of northern Laos. Over the course of these adventures, the Cohens learn to live as a family twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week and enjoy a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to spend time together without the distractions of modern life. The author rediscovers the world through his children’s eyes and gains new perspective of his own life. This humorous, heartfelt story is the next best thing to taking the trip yourself

Reprint of the original, first published in 1876.

In this commentary, Simpson observations include much commentary on the degree of "civilization" among various peoples and the results thereof--often not positive, especially with regards to the impact of missionaries on local culture and morality. Simpson also provides economic and trade analyses, linguistic comparisons, culinary critiques, and descriptions of local flora and fauna. [PRBM].

NATIONAL BESTSELLER WINNER OF THE RBC TAYLOR PRIZE WINNER OF THE EDNA STAEBLER AWARD FOR CREATIVE NON-FICTION "Every day on a bike trip is like the one before--but it is also completely different, or perhaps you are different, woken up in new ways by the mile." As a teenager, Kate Harris realized that the career she most craved--that of a generalist explorer, equal parts swashbuckler and philosopher--had gone extinct. From her small-town home in Ontario, it seemed as if Marco Polo, Magellan and their like had long ago mapped the whole earth. So she vowed to become a scientist and go to Mars. To pass the time before she could launch into outer space, Kate set off by bicycle down a short section of the fabled Silk Road with her childhood friend Mel Yule, then settled down to study at Oxford and MIT. Eventually the truth dawned on her: an explorer, in any day and age, is by definition the kind of person who refuses to live between the lines. And Harris had soared most fully out of bounds right here on Earth, travelling a bygone trading route on her bicycle. So she quit the laboratory and hit the Silk Road again with Mel, this time determined to bike it from the beginning to end. Like Rebecca Solnit and Pico Iyer before her, Kate Harris offers a travel narrative at once exuberant and meditative, wry and rapturous. Weaving adventure and deep reflection with the history of science and exploration, Lands of Lost Borders explores the nature of limits and the wildness of a world that, like the self and like the stars, can never be fully mapped.

A Financial Times Summer Book of 2019 Seasoned adventurer Alastair Humphreys pushes himself to his very limits – busking his way across Spain with a violin he can barely play.